Evans Gambit

A continuation for The Giuoco Piano. The Evans Gambit, named after William Evans who played it extensively and has the first recorded use of it in 1826, immediately adds some excitement to that opening. A good gambit for those who are willing to risk for mobility and rapid attack but dont want the extreme risk of the King's Gambit. Here is the chess notation.

The Evans Gambit, one of the most topical chess openings of the last century, experienced a sharp decline in popularity when ways were found for Black to equalize easily and avoid the dangerous attacking lines that had made it such a feared weapon. However, it has never really disappeared completely, and both Bobby Fischer and Garry Kasparov have wheeled out this gambit as a nasty surprise for unprepared opponents.

The opening moves are:

1.e4 e5
2.Nf3 Nc6
3.Bc4 Bc5
So far this is a normal king's pawn opening continuation, and with the move 4.c3 White could initiate the Giuoco Piano, another ancient opening whose heyday has passed. However, with 4.b4, the first move of the Evans Gambit, White sacrifices a pawn in order to play c2-c3 with gain of tempo by attacking the Black bishop.
4.b4 Bxb4 (Black can decline the offered pawn with 4...Bb6, accepting a slight loss of space on the queenside)
5.c3 Be7 (alternative moves here are 5...Ba5 and 5...Bc5)
6.d4

It may seem foolhardy to give up a whole pawn just to gain a single move in the opening, but in open king's pawn games a single move can mean the difference between victory and humiliation. If Black plays passively, he can lose very quickly. Therefore his best plan is to return the pawn immediately and attack White's well-placed bishop with 6...Na5 7.Nxe5 Nxc4 8.Nxc4 d5, which until recently was thought to guarantee at least a level game.

More recently, Garry Kasparov sparked a mini-renaissance in the Evans Gambit when he played a new move against Black's main defensive strategy (which begins 6...d5 as shown above) - one which renewed White's attacking chances and forced a re-evaluation of the entire line. This was all the more remarkable because, whereas Fischer's game against Fine was casual, Kasparov played his move against Viswanathan Anand, one of the top 5 players in the world, in a serious tournament. Bemused grandmasters found themselves studying 100-year-old theoretical lines in a gambit which they had thought consigned to the dustbin of chess history. Kasparov's novelty and the score of the game against Anand are also given in the endnotes below.

This kind of re-evaluation of old chess openings is occurring frequently in modern chess, with creative players returning to discarded lines in an effort to find new and fertile grounds for innovation. Chess opening theory has become so unwieldy and vast (more books have been written on chess than all other sports combined) that some players, including Bobby Fischer, have even suggested altering the initial setup of the pieces, in order to make obsolete the requirement on all top grandmasters to memorize huge quantities of opening variations. For details of these suggestions, see Fischer Random Chess.